First President Trump-ordered raid kills 8-year-old American girl, six years after her teenage brother died in drone strike

Little Nawar al-Awlaki was shot and killed during a Sunday raid targeting militants in southern Yemen, her grandfather said.

The first military strike ordered by President Trump resulted in the death of the 8-year-old daughter of an Al Qaeda leader — killed six years after her father and brother perished in attacks ordered by former President Barack Obama.

Nawar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born daughter of Yemeni terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, was shot dead during the Sunday raid targeting militants in southern Yemen, her grandfather said Tuesday.

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"She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours," Nasser al-Awlaki told Reuters. "Why kill children? This is the new (U.S.) administration. It's very sad, a big crime."

Medics said at least nine other women and children were killed in the raid.

The child's mother, Anwar al-Awlaki's widow, survived the raid with a minor injury.

Three Al Qaeda members were also killed in the raid, according to U.S. officials.

A U.S. commando — a 36-year-old Navy SEAL Team 6 member from Illinois named William (Ryan) Owens — also died, and three more were wounded while carrying out the deadly dawn attack, officials said Monday.

The commando was most recently assigned to the Special Warfare unit based in Virginia Beach.

Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski paid tribute to Owens shortly after his identity was made public Monday night.

He called Owens "an exceptional SEAL" who served "silently, nobly and bravely through several combat deployments."

On Tuesday, Trump offered his condolences to the Owens family.

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White House spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed that Trump had a "somber and lengthy" conversation with the family — but offered no other details about the operation.

The raid — conducted by the Joint Special Operations Command — was aimed at capturing intelligence, specifically computer equipment, a senior U.S. military official said.

The U.S. has not yet commented on Nawar's death. A Pentagon statement did not refer to any civilian casualties, although a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they could not be ruled out.

American forces had not conducted any special operations in Yemen since December 2014, months before nearly two years of civil war rendered the country even more dangerous and offered Al Qaeda leeway to expand into more lawless areas.

Former President Barack Obama ordered the 2011 strike that killed the girl's dad. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

But during Obama's early years in office, U.S. forces conducted dozens of drone strikes in Yemen to combat Al Qaeda throughout the Arabian Peninsula — including the ones that killed Anwar al-Awlaki.

A U.S. citizen born in New Mexico, Awlaki died in a 2011 drone strike ordered by Obama with the explicit purpose of killing the terrorist. Awlaki's Islamist propaganda was blamed for inspiring the Fort Hood shooting massacre and the so-called "underwear bomber."

Two weeks after his killing, a second drone strike reportedly killed his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who also was born in the U.S. The teen's cousin and several other Yemenis also died in that strike.

The White House maintained that the boy and other innocent Yemenis were not the intended targets of the blast, labeling their deaths as "collateral damage."

The local Al Qaeda unit has long been regarded as one of the global militant group's most dangerous branches. It organized the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack in Paris in 2015 and has repeatedly tried to down U.S. planes.

In explaining Sunday's raid, a senior U.S. military official said "Al Qaeda is probably stronger in Yemen than in any other country. The U.S. has mounted an intense effort for the past three years from ship, air and drone to go after a reconstituting core Al Qaeda organization in Yemen."